Sunday, 4 November 2012

From house to hip hop, creating loops is one of the fundamental elements of beat making and electronic music production.

Creating Disco House Loops with Danny J Lewis for Point Blank

Point Blank's Danny J Lewis takes a well-known disco favourite - Shalamar's 'A Night to Remember' - and flips it to give it that very popular sultry house vibe.

To do this, he starts by time stretching the track just a little bit, so as not to corrupt the quality of the sample. He then finds parts of the track that he wants to loop, staying away from the chorus and instead highlighting less familiar parts of the track, which has a real groove throughout. Later on, Danny introduces delays and in time honoured tradition, filters the samples using a low pass filter, creating a quintessential dance music effect. This is a great video for anyone starting out making sample based music. Danny uses a lot of effects and techniques which are fundamental to making sample based music in a way which is very easy to understand. Whilst this will end up as a house track, these techniques are just as relevant and applicable to other forms of sample based music such as hip hop, where the time stretching and filtering of samples has been used for years like it has in house music. One word of warning: Just to re-iterate a point that Danny makes at the beginning of the video and on the Point Blank blog, there are legal implications for sampling someone else's record. If you want to put out a record which samples another record, be sure to clear the sample first.